allocate
by cornwallace
Summary: You can only pick the world around you to a limited extent.
1. filth

_ _ _  
filth 

* * *

In the shower, it's safe to cry. She can't tell the difference between her own tears and the water rolling down her face, and thus she permits herself to feel something.  
Crying is seen as a weakness where she comes from. This hasn't changed since her transition from where she was to where she is now.

As long as even she can't see herself do it, it's okay. She has nothing to hide.

When she closes her eyes, she sees his face. His fur matted down with sweat and blood. His eyes, half open. Almost as if he's unaware what is happening to him.  
Dreaming through it.

The cannon that brought him down resting upon her shoulder. Leading him. Not even knowing it's him. Just doing what she's paid to do as a mercenary.  
She fires and the blue ball of plasma cuts through the night sky. Tracer clinging closely to it, flickering out like a flame being guided by the wind. The trajectory.

Kick causes her to stumble backwards, but she sets herself straight to watch the projectile fly through the sky and tag his wing, sending him spiraling downward to her level.  
She doesn't take the time to let herself feel anything. She simply drops the spent weapon and skips to a run towards the falling ship amid the chaos.

The sound of the water splashing against her and the metal around her drowning out all the sound. She's lost in the static for a moment.  
Rubbing her face, the top and back of her head. Soaking her fur. Scrubbing away the filth.

Filth.

Dried up blood. Some of it hers, some of it not.  
Oily brown water sucked through the vortex spinning over the drain.

Warm water relaxing the tense and aching muscles of her body as she calms down. She closes her eyes again. She crosses an ally tank's path from behind it and heads through the field for the woods where it crashed.  
Specks of flame in the surrounding trees and foliage lead her to it.

And before she knows it she's wrenching open the thick spiderwebbed plexiglass hatch.  
And before she realizes what's happening she's staring into his weary, dying eyes.

Looking at her through eyes glassy and half closed. Slowly blinking.  
He seems unaware of his surroundings. Like an infant, looking out onto everything with a clean slate.

She wonders if she'd help him if she wasn't sure just by looking at him that he was going to die.  
She doesn't have to kill him. She doesn't have to do anything. She doesn't need this money. But he's already dead.

She unholsters her pistol and points it at his head. Without thinking she pulls the trigger and the laser tears its way through his skull, singing the fabric on the seat behind him.  
The corpse smiles lifelessly at her with one eye and one hole straight through the back of his head.

Scrubbing and rinsing.  
Silently crying.

Krystal catches her breath leaning against the weight of the water valve.

The water shuts off and she stands there for a moment in silence. The water occasionally dripping and splashing at her feet.  
Inhale. Exhale. Hold.

You're fine, Krystal mouths to herself among the quiet. You're fine now. 


	2. cleanse

_ _ _ _ _ _  
cleanse

* * *

One eye.  
One empty and lifeless eye.

When god spoke to her whisper, she almost died.

Maggot-like parasites lining the decay on the void of the opposite. Feeding off his devalued window to the world. His brain is a rotting prison in which he envisions a world where it would have worked between them.  
Fox and Krystal. Forever.

His finger twitches. Perhaps he's still in there. Dreaming, envisioning. Visions of locking eyes, holding hands somewhere in the nightmare reel of his remaining brain activity.  
Memories playing out like 8mm film. Fantasies playing out like a sock puppet show in the dark.  
Just out of reach.

And still, ever so subtly, his finger twitches.

* * *

Her eyes pop open.  
She recoils from his touch. Rolling over onto her back to face him. She tells him not to touch her by saying something like "don't touch me."  
Expressing concern for his well being, he asks her what her problem is by saying something along the lines of "what is your fucking problem?"  
She doesn't talk about it. "I don't want to talk about it."  
"Suits me," I think he says. Then he says something inaudible.  
"Fuck you," she says. "It has nothing to do with him."  
"Oh, it doesn't?" He's angry now. "How big was his dick?"  
"Excuse me?"  
"You heard me," Panther says folding his arms, angrily. "How big was his dick? Bet it isn't bigger than Wolf's. That's canon, that's pretty much a fact. You should have fucked him instead."

Panther gets like this sometimes. It's upsetting and strange.

"Keentaboo no powtaka," Krystal says in her native tongue, frustrated. "Shabla akeemo."  
"Hey now. What the fuck did I say about talkin' that stupid ass lizardspeak in front of me? When you talk to me, speak fuckin' Cornerian."  
"SHABLA AKEEMO," she snaps at him, jabbing him in the chest with her knuckles. "Poppap no watta y krimbline! Eesa yo poppap!"  
"Bitch, you about to piss me off," he says, already pissed off. "You stop it right now."  
"Kabla shabla akemptibo," she says bitterly.

Panther responds by slapping her.

Panther is an island.

Panther takes satisfaction in watching her recoil into a submissive position on the bed. Her legs bent at the knee beside her. Her head looking down. Face in her hand. Nursing her wound. Not noticing her free hand gliding down her own thigh to the knife she has strapped to her shin. Unsheathing the weapon she strikes with accuracy, plunging the knife directly into his heart.

Panther cracks like porcelain and shatters into a million angry fans of Star Fox. They shout things at her like "why won't you have sex with me" and "it's what you were created for" and "fie on you beast woman!"  
They throw toothpick sized spears into her legs and she stomps on them with bare feet. Their tiny little bones cracking under torn flesh and fur. She picks one of the little fuckers up and swallows him whole. His last words echoing through her throat and mouth "this is the best day of my life."  
She picks up handfuls of them and smashes them into the wall, into each other. Splattering the cold metal walls like a bad Jackson Pollock painting. Small spears sticking out of her arms and face and neck.

She screams triumphant into the void. The remains of countless fans smeared all over her immediate world.  
Red. She sees red.

* * *

The sheets are bloody with their blood and her blood. She leans her back and head against the wall behind the bed.  
Between her and the wall, propped up as well, sits Fox McCloud. Deader than she left him. He quietly rots. The writing of maggots just barely audible in the silence.  
She stares ahead. Vacant expression as if her soul has evacuated.

Finally, she speaks.

"I wasn't supposed to exist for the benefit of you or your universe," she says. "I was supposed to stand on my own, but they took that away from me. This is how I was allocated."

"If it's any consolation, you really did make it better." Fox doesn't move as he speaks. His mouth doesn't move. His body doesn't move.  
Only the maggots. They feed.

"It's not," she's not blinking. Her tired voice just above a whisper. "It never has been and it never will be."

"That's unfortunate," he says or doesn't say.

"Is that all you have to say or not say?"

Metal grinding. Whirring in the distance. Only her eyes move, upward.  
The walls begin corroding under the harsh strain of entropy. The bed stays where it is, drifting in the ultimate void of space.  
He answers all of her questions but he isn't self-aware.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"I don't believe you," she says. "You're dead."

"That doesn't make me any less sorry," he says.

"I was going to carve my own path in this universe. Reduced to a fucking love interest for either you or the self-inserts. Crisis. I'm calling shenanigans."

Her eyes drift downward to the umbilical cord between her legs. She doesn't bother tracing it to her dead extension. She knows what it looks like. She knows what it was supposed to look like.  
Soon the maggots will feed on it as well, and by extension, they'll feed their way through her.

"Could it have worked?" Fox asks or doesn't ask.

Krystal doesn't know. "I don't know."

"I'm sorry I wasn't good enough for you."

"It's nothing personal," she says. "It has nothing to do with you."

"That's a hard pill to swallow." Fox says or doesn't say.

"Nobody ever said learning and growing was supposed to be easy."

A pause. "You're right."

"Why don't you take the baby on down to hell with you? I'm going to stop existing for awhile."

"Okay. I will."

"See you next time."

Fox is already gone. "See you," he does or doesn't say.

The blood of the fans Panther was made of still remains. Krystal finally moves, examining the stained fur on her hands. She tries to force out a laugh, but it sounds more like a 'huh'.

The lights go out, and Krystal is left to not exist for awhile.


	3. memories of god

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  
memories of god 

* * *

Krystal dreams of a land of dinosaurs before Star Fox existed there.


End file.
